Stanley stared at the small, glass bottle in his hand, turning it over and over along with his thoughts. The milky liquid swilled along the inside of the vial, leaving viscous dregs of medicine oozing against the tinted glass before sloshing back to the other side. The clock on the fireplace mantle ticked loudly, reminding him of the hour. He’d put Lilah down for her nap over an hour ago; she would be waking shortly and looking for her usual afternoon snack of apple juice and graham crackers. That was ready and waiting for her on the kitchen table, along with her favorite stuffed bunny. The only thing missing from her placemat was the little dropper of medicine, which she took every morning at breakfast and every afternoon at three-fifteen on the nose.
Except for today.
Her father had been grappling with his decision for nearly two years – ever since Lilah’s last seizure transformed their living room into a forest. Since then, he had spent every waking moment of his extended sabbatical trying to figure out why that happened. And how. But after months and months of searching, he wasn’t any closer to finding a concrete answer.
The time he spent poring over the history of the house and the land upon which it was built provided Stanley the simple comfort of knowing that their living room was not built upon any ancient burial grounds – nor was it the site of any gruesome historical events that may have resulted in a resident, forest-conjuring poltergeist. Since the house didn’t appear to be haunted, and Stanley himself didn’t display any other symptoms of insanity – he researched that particular subject at length – he had to conclude that the strange incidents that had occurred in the house were, in fact, a direct result of Lilah’s seizures. So, Stanley’s next mission was learning everything he could on the subject of epilepsy. He pulled every medical text he could find regarding epilepsy and pediatric seizures from the library, most of which remained piled on the coffee table to that day, months past their due date. Not one study cited preternatural cancer predictions or woodland summoning. In fact, Dr. Kreuter himself gave Stanley a long, concerned look when he casually asked the doctor whether he had heard of any seizure-induced paranormal events.
Clearly, Lilah’s condition wasn’t something that had ever been seen or studied before.
Since his esoteric quest appeared to be unearthing more questions than answers, Stanley tried a more straightforward task: figuring out who left Lilah at the fire station, and why. He combed through every newspaper article published within the last three years that mentioned missing babies from that time period – a topic that made Stanley hug Lilah tightly at the end of each and every library visit. Still, none of the missing children fit the timeline of events or Lilah’s physical description. There was one article about a woman and her teenage daughter who disappeared the same night that Lilah was found on the steps of the fire station; their abandoned van was discovered about twenty-five miles away from town the next morning. The story piqued Stanley’s interest, and he spent a full week delving into the details. The women had apparently moved to Montana a month before their disappearance, but lived as recluses inside the house they rented. After they disappeared, no one ever saw them again. Nevertheless, there was no mention of a baby anywhere in that article or in subsequent citations. Even Sheriff Reid confirmed that the women’s cold case file revealed nothing whatsoever about a missing newborn. It would seem that the date of their disappearance was just a sad coincidence.
Though the failed searches left Stanley with more questions than answers, his own common sense provided him with this much: Lilah was almost certainly abandoned – not kidnapped – probably because her parents were frightened of whatever it was that she made them see. From that perspective, it made sense that they never reported her as missing. The fact of the matter was, her family members – whoever they were – didn’t want her back.
Stanley scratched his head tiredly. He’d been pacing the house for the better part of the afternoon, turning the most pressing question over and over in his head, as he had done countless afternoons before: what happened, exactly, when Lilah had a seizure? Who was affected, and why? And how? For the hundredth time since Marie’s diagnosis, Stanley tried to boil everything down to just the basic facts: Lilah had epilepsy and suffered from seizures that were considered somewhere between petit and grand mal in nature. The first one he witnessed, which exposed Marie’s illness and the end of her life, was perhaps forty-five seconds long. The second one, which conjured a forest into their home, may have lasted as long as a minute. The medication Dr. Kreuter prescribed for Lilah kept her seizures well under control – so long as she didn’t skip any doses. But Lilah’s seizures weren’t just seizures. They were… something else. Something powerful and inexplicable, yet seemingly confined to a limited radius. A radius in which Lilah herself appeared to be the epicenter.
Stanley glanced at the dendrology textbook that was draped across the arm of the sofa. He was certain that the trees that had momentarily appeared in place of his living room were Lodgepole pines. And while it was true that his house hadn’t been built upon any cemeteries, his research confirmed that a Lodgepole pine forest had once existed where their lot now stood. That meant that Lilah’s seizure might have shown what had been. Furthermore, Marie had insisted that she had physical symptoms relating to her diagnosis well before they brought Lilah into the home. Which meant that Lilah’s seizure was, in fact, a preview of what was to come.
And so, it came to this: as far as Stanley could tell – and the thought seemed absurd even to him – his pony-loving, three-year-old daughter was somehow manipulating time and space around her, sometimes showing the future, as she did with Marie, and sometimes showing the past, based on the fact that the forest she mustered had been cut down decades ago. The hypothesis was sound, at least in Stanley’s mind, but certain details were still unclear to him. For example, why had Marie gotten caught in Lilah’s temporal anomaly, whereas he hadn’t been affected? Was it a simple matter of proximity, since she was closer to the baby when it happened? Furthermore, if Lilah did indeed show the future, why did his wife never lose her hair or become sick and skeletal at the end of her life, as the seizure seemed to indicate would happen?
The baby showed me what was yet to come, my love. She showed me my future. And in doing so, she gave me a tremendous gift.
Stanley glanced at Marie’s photo on the mantle. With every fiber of her being, his wife had believed those words to be true, so much so that she bet her life on them. It was her belief that having knowledge of her fate empowered her to change and take control of it. If that were true – and, in Stanley’s mind, everything his wife had ever uttered was true – it meant that Lilah had only revealed the future as it was projected to be, based solely on the events leading up to that moment. When Marie changed course, having seen a glimpse of what was to come, she changed her future… which meant the future itself wasn’t set in stone.
Stanley rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. If the future wasn’t concrete, and Lilah had the ability to revive the past, that meant there was only one thing he needed to do in order to prove his hypothesis. If only he could work up the nerve to do it.
“Hi, Daddy,” Lilah yawned, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she plodded into the living room. Her feathery auburn hair, which had been left in disarray by her pillow, seemed to form a static halo around her head.
“Good afternoon, sunshine!” Stanley smiled. He quickly tucked the bottle of medicine in his shirt pocket before rising to give her a hug. “Did you have a good nap?”
“Uh-huh,” she replied, taking his hand as they walked to the kitchen together. “Crackers an’ juice?”
“Yep, right here,” he answered, lifting her into her chair. He took a seat beside her, where his own snack – an apple from the backyard tree – was waiting. He took a big bite out of it, flicking chunks of fruit from his scruffy whiskers as he chewed.
“Yummy,” Lilah mumbled appreciatively through a mouthful of graham cracker. After a moment, she looked around the table. “Daddy, where’s my medicine?”
“Oh, yeah, about that… We have to go to the pharmacy to get more. We’ll do that right after your snack.” Stanley fiddled with a thread at the bottom of his shirt, which only made the fabric unravel further. “We just, uh, have to make a quick stop first.”
“Where we going?” Lilah asked, taking a sip from her juice box.
“We’re going to go visit Mommy.”